Iowa AG Bird scores win against ad giants in Texas court

Mike Bunge
July 5, 2026

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird has announced a settlement to stop six of the nation’s largest advertising agencies from manipulating digital advertising and suppressing free speech.

The six companies—Havas Media Group USA, WPP, Publicis, Dentsu, Omnicom and IPG—control hundreds of individual agencies and billions of dollars in global annual ad spend. Starting in 2018, these companies imposed what they called “brand safety” standards across the digital advertising industry.

Bird says the ad agencies agreed to adopt the standards and stopped purchasing digital advertisements on websites containing what they classified as “misinformation.” She says the advertisers created organizations that determined which opinions were disfavored and used that information to target the companies’ advertisers.

Bird says certain news and opinion sites lost the ability to earn money, particularly conservative publishers, because they were denied critical digital advertising revenue. She says advertisers lost the benefits of competition since they had fewer media options to choose from, and American consumers were denied the benefit of a competitive media marketplace.

“Iowans have a right to make their own decisions about what they read and buy with their hard-earned money,” Bird said. “These advertising giants thought they could secretly rewrite the rules by denying digital publishers ad revenue simply because they disagreed with their viewpoints. This settlement restores competition between ad agencies and is a massive win for the First Amendment.”

Iowa joined the federal antitrust complaint alongside the FTC, Florida, Indiana, Montana, Nebraska, Texas, Utah and West Virginia. The settlement mandates the largest U.S. advertising agencies will be strictly prohibited from agreements that set common brand safety standards or restrict advertising based on biased, ideologically driven or politically motivated criteria.

The complaint and proposed final order were filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.